Whether Americans like it or not, the “outside” world judges them on the actions of their “elected leaders”. And so it should be. Any American citizen that persists in laying claim to democratic statehood for their country must also logically accept responsibility for the actions of their government representatives, who they themselves have elected (at least as part of the theory of democracy).

Even in the case that the President achieved office by fraudulent means, the responsibility for this and for allowing it to continue, must also lie with the American people.

Regardless of the argument that it is the years of social and political mind programming and the concomitant eroding of rights which are to blame for the present dire, disenfranchised, intellectually anaesthetised state in which many Americans find themselves, in the end, with whom does the responsibility to do something about it lie, if not with the American people?

Each of us finds ourselves in the position we are in, not as a result of some cruel twist of fate or the “hand of god” but rather as a result of who we are and what we see.

There seems to exist a strong desire (natural or otherwise) within human beings in general to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and their resulting life situation. It could be said that if people were to apply the same, (often considerable) skill for finding something else to point the finger at for their own troubled life situation, to accepting responsibility for and resolving their issues, the world and the people that inhabit it would likely be much happier.

Today, with the wealth of facts and evidence available, many Americans must surely be feeling extreme discomfort as they are forced to resort to increasingly illogical and irrational explanations to allow them to hold on to the idea that they are living in a democracy or that their “elected leaders” are working in their best interests. At some point it becomes too much, and as the mind weighs up the enormous size of that square peg and the pinprick size of the round hole the realisation dawns that it can simply no longer be done.

What then? Begin the difficult task of looking objectively at what IS and accepting responsibility for where we find ourselves?

Well, apparently not. Such is the need and strength of desire to maintain the illusory, rosy view of reality (personal and global), that when almost all evidence to support such a view dries up, most Americans it seems will choose out and out denial rather than undertaking the necessary and logical deconstruction of their cherished illusions.

Denial is generally accepted as “not good” for others, yet few are willing or able to admit the level to which they indulge in it themselves. It is likely however that, due to the almost superhuman efforts that must be made to maintain the level of denial being practiced by many citizens of the US today, it cannot last very long.

The problem is that to maintain a view of the world that finds no reflection whatsoever in objective reality takes A LOT of energy, a person must forcibly create it and at the same time convince others of its reality, energy that most people simply do not have.

If you are Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney however, you are in a more favourable position.

It seems that Don and Dick and the other back room boys have for many years harboured designs on the “throne.” They fancy themselves as “kings of the world” as it were. Just check out their statement of principles at theProject for the New American Century.

The scary thing however is that they find themselves in a position of being able to actually fashion objective reality around their perverted visions. One of these visions it appears was that the US should be under permanent threat. It wasn’t at the time, but with a little efffort they were able to manufacture it, and manufacture it they did.

Our dear President, on this his birthday finds himself in a similar position where his twisted and seemingly psychopathic view of the world, in which he is lord and master, can easily be manifested. For example, we are talking about a man who ran scared from the very whiff of military service during the Vietnam war, yet NOW, all he has to do is order an aircraft carrier, an F-16 and the American media, and hey! presto! he creates the “reality” for himself, and the dozing Americans, that he single-handedly won the Iraq war!

But back to us mere mortals. We are not so “lucky.” We, at this point in our sordid world history, are unfortunately faced with stark choices. Things on this planet (and very likely in our personal lives) are not as they seem, they are not as we have been lead to believe, and ultimately there is nothing we can do to make them so.

For a long time we have been able to convince ourselves that our view of the world and our place in it was viable, basically because to some extent, up to now, things were more “open”, the future was perhaps more “open” and we could allow ourselves the luxury of “maybe”.

No longer it seems.

Denial of the objective reality of this will get us nowhere, leading only to either depression as we, in vain, attempt to shut out the truth staring us in the face; or anger as we subconsciously realise that our sacred cows are ultimately bound for the slaughterhouse anyway. Indeed, it seems that depression and/or anger is the overriding emotion pervading many America cities these days.

The truth, it seems, is that “lock down” is in operation, things are being steered in a very definite direction, and those at the wheel are not really trying very hard anymore to hide the destination.

There exists, however, an opportunity for us all to do something about this decidedly negative situation in which we find ourselves. It has only been by our acceptance of, and support for, this illusory worldview our leaders have presented to us, that they have been able to bring the world to the brink of disaster upon which it now sits.

Acceptance of what IS, however unsavoury (and it IS unsavoury to say the least, unless you are John D. Rockefeller), is what is required. Stubbornly refusing to do so and hanging on to an ever more untenable and contradictory worldview, simply furthers the narcissistic goals of the few and may ultimately lead to our own undoing, in ways that we cannot yet even imagine.

All of life serves knowledge. Simply by being alive we are learning. It is our choice to seek to learn either Truth, that which IS, or to attempt to force the “truth” to conform to the limited simplistic, beliefs foisted upon us by those men that would have all of reality reflect their own twisted imaginings.

“Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the ‘past.’ People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the ‘Future.'” – Cassiopaeans, 09-28-02